Scarlett - Cathy Cassidy [18]
I turn away, furious, marching along the shore, but within minutes I trip, scrambling over a knot of gnarled tree roots, falling heavily I’ve torn one of the ribbon ties on my sandal, and a hot, burning pain shoots through my left ankle. My eyes prickle with tears of anger, but I won’t cry. I never cry – not since Dad left, anyhow. It’d be like letting him see how much he hurt me. Crying is for kids. I scream instead, a bloodcurdling yell that startles the birds and shakes the treetops before tailing off to a whimper.
I pull off my wedge heels and fling them away into the trees ahead of me, because they’ve ripped my feet to shreds and I don’t care if I never see them again as long as I live.
I hobble along the shoreline, my black tights all ripped and holed, but I can’t put any weight on my twisted ankle and I have to give up. There’s a tree up ahead, a little twisty tree with soft green leaves that sits at the head of the lough. A bubble of water trickles through its bony roots, and little flashes of red peep through the leaves as I approach. Scarves and rags are tied into its branches, like ribbons in a little girl’s hair. Weird.
I blink. Up in the foliage, one of my red and pink wedge sandals hangs, dangling from a tangled loop of ribbon. I sit down, leaning my back against the trunk, letting the icy water run over my toes, looking out across the lough.
My ankle is hurting like crazy, and now I can see it’s swollen too. Perfect. I close my eyes, wondering how I have managed to make such a mess of my life. If it’s all about choices, I guess I just pick the wrong ones, time after time after time.
The light is fading, streaking the sky with icecream colours – vanilla, strawberry, raspberry ripple. If I’m not careful, I’ll be spending the night here, burrowing down into the dry leaves, resting my head on a fallen branch. It doesn’t seem like such a bad idea.
If this was a kid’s fairy tale, birds and dormice would fetch me magical blankets woven from spider’s web silk or velvet moss, because it’s getting chilly now. I wouldn’t be sitting alone by a deserted lough in the middle of nowhere, hacked off, clueless, hungry, cold. I’d have met wolves and woodcutters, witches and dwarves and handsome princes to make my dreams come true.
Yeah, right. Even the birds and the dormice are staying out of my way.
I wish I didn’t feel so alone.
Suddenly, on the edge of my vision where the shoreline curves round towards a distant rocky headland, something is moving. I can’t see clearly at first, because of the fading light and the soft pink glow of the sunset, but then my eyes stretch wide with disbelief.
The horse comes out of the sunset, galloping along the edge of the lough like something from a dream. I can hear the thud of its hooves on damp mud, see the water splash out around it. It’s a stocky black horse with a flash of white at its forehead, hooves feathered with cream-coloured hair that’s damp and crimped from the lough. It slows as it turns from the water’s edge and comes towards me, shaking its head and blowing hot air through flaring nostrils.
The rider looks down at me, his dark eyes shining, black hair flopping across his face. His T-shirt is faded and worn, his jeans are frayed and one brown hand is twisted into the horse’s mane.
‘I’ve been looking for you,’ he says.
Of course, a boy from the lough could look right into my soul and turn it inside out. He wouldn’t need to ask questions. He’d just pull me up beside him on the big black horse and we’d gallop into the water, splashing through the shallows and out towards the silver-pink horizon.
That doesn’t happen. When he says ‘I’ve been looking for you,’ I snarl right back with ‘Yeah? Well, looks like you’ve found me now.’ He raises one eyebrow, just a fraction, and I cover my mouth with my hands so that nothing else mean and spiky can leak out.
‘You’re the English girl,’ the boy says. ‘Half of Kilimoor